Notes on …Vodka

James Bond’s ‘Vodka martini, shaken, not stirred’ will never be a mark of sophistication for me because vodka and I go back too far. Our association began when I was nine or ten in that brief interlude after the second world war when Russia was still ‘our noble ally’. Vodka was simply one more new thing, marketed when pizza was still called ‘pizza pie’ and the strict law pushed for years by the butter interests was dropped, permitting margarine to be sold coloured instead of white.

Putting margarine ‘on the table’, once unforgiveable, quickly became common practice, but vodka’s image problems were harder to shake. The USA is a whiskey country. Whiskey has to be aged, while vodka, like gin, does not. Therefore, went American thinking, vodka was rotgut, just like the gin we made in bathtubs during the Prohibition Twenties. So if you just wanted to get drunk, you might as well buy the cheapest brand of vodka in the store and save your money for ‘good’ whiskey, i.e.,